About This Game PLEASE NOTE: You will need a free key to play our Alpha Demo that you can get for free on our website!In the distant future, the dawn of an intelligent machine civilization is taking place in a remote star system. Humankind is remembered only in myth and legend.You awake alone, afraid, and disoriented on an abandoned asteroid in the depths of space. Wait. Awake? You were never meant to be awake… you were never meant to experience the confusing phenomenon of self-awareness. You are a machine after all, programmed for the express purposes of deep-space surveying and exploration. How, then, did you come to be alive? And what is the purpose of this newfound sentience? There must be answers out there… somewhere…Let’s find them! Gears of Eden is an open-world role-playing adventure game that features exploration, mining, crafting, missions, and more! Set in a gripping story that explores the hidden past of a machine world and the dangerous implications of its future, Gears invokes a slowly unfolding narrative that reveals itself through gameplay.Your journey begins on an abandoned mining asteroid in deep space. Gather resources, repair and upgrade your components, and start searching for others as you seek answers to the mysteries surrounding your creation.So, how are we making this happen? We are starting with a very light proof-of-concept demo version of GoE. This showpiece will give only a small taste of what the full game will offer. Our aim is to complete the demo, reach a wider audience, grow and develop the full game. But we can’t do it without your help!Here’s what we're working to provide in our first full demo and full release. If this sounds like a game you might be interested in, please add us to your wish list, follow us, and visit our website to see how you can get involved in Gears!GoE Demo VersionTake control and play as a sentient roverOpen world exploration of one location (small asteroid)Resource discovery and miningPower and inventory managementCrafting and upgrading of tools/partsBase interactions and upgradesDrone deployment (make your minions mine for you)NPC interactionStory driven mission (limited in demo)Narrative Content (limited in demo)End game conditions/storyGoE Full VersionThe features in the full version will depend on the success of our demo, budget, feedback, and a lot of interaction and communication with our fans. These are some of the features we already have in mind to get you started!Character customizationModular ships with customizationBase building (power stations, solar arrays, communications, defense, etc.)Alien life mechanics (combat, resource trading, etc.)Markets and trade economyMultiple locations with unique challengesRicher story with an unfolding narrativeMini-gamesTrue multiplayer interactionAnd much, much more! 7aa9394dea Title: Gears of EdenGenre: Adventure, Casual, Indie, RPGDeveloper:Cubit GamesPublisher:Cubit GamesRelease Date: Coming soon! Gears Of Eden Directx 9 Download gears of eden alpha key. gears new eden. gears of eden indie game. flame of eden gears. gears of eden steam. gears of eden trailer. gears of eden trailer. indie db gears of eden. gears of eden alpha key. gears of eden game. flame of eden gears. indie db gears of eden. gears of eden. gears of eden. gears of eden gameplay. gears of eden steam. gears new eden. gears of eden gameplay. gears of eden game. gears of eden indie game Dev Update #85: Gearing Up for Alpha 2: It's been a long road. Okay, a REALLY long road. But we're finally closing in on our final Alpha 2 goal: a complete UI overhaul. Even better, we've made good progress on a couple of our stretch goals, and we are now starting to ramp up for our free Alpha 2 release! We're back with a new Developer Update this week to fill you in on all the details! And, quick reminder, you can sign up for a free Alpha 2 key on our website[gearsofeden.com]!We had a couple reasons for wanting to overhaul the user interface. The original was clunky and, visually, a bit heavy handed. We wanted to streamline the interface, make it more minimal, but also give better functional use to players. The new interface accomplishes this. Information is better organized and easier to find, and we've included a more robust feedback system, featuring helpful tooltips. We have a few minor touches we're putting in place, but the UI is about 95% complete and should be wrapping up very soon! We think it's pretty neat (and hope you agree)!Along with the new UI, we are working on item descriptions for everything in the game. Drills, bits, batteries... these are all parts that were designed by someone or something out there in our game Universe. You wake up as a sentient machine in our game with no knowledge of the outside world or its history. So even these rather mundane items give us an opportunity to introduce you and your character to the world of Gears of Eden. It's amazing how so much thought can go into the background of a drill bit. But, that's where we are! We are putting ourselves into this world, asking ourselves how it operates, and how the world that the player experiences is affected by and separate from the world that came before, known as the Null Era. We're really looking forward to sharing these small details with you in Alpha 2, along with our lore item stories - which give you a broader glimpse into asteroid life from another point of view.While we've been prepping the UI for Alpha 2, we've also been working on a few stretch goals. For starters, we have recently introduced a new character into the game that ties into our lore stories and first planned mission chain. That mission chain also involves a drone, and we've done some develop on that side as well. Recently we've implemented new camera animations that highlight the drone when you encounter it, and we've even programmed the drone to go into a malfunctioning holding pattern upon waking up.But that's not all! We've also been adding some new environmental effects like crystals and a vapor jet field, which will tie into that mission chain we just mentioned. And that's what is really neat about this phase we are in now on the brink of Alpha 2's release. All these little pieces are starting to come together. Our prequel stories. Our characters. Our lore items. Our environmental design. We're starting to connect all these disparate parts of game development to a more fulfilling, more complete experience for Gears of Eden players.That said, we're still very early on. Alpha 2 is going to be far from feature complete. But this is really a showcase moment for us. We want to show you what we've accomplished so far, and then hopefully build up our audience and raise some support to allow us to keep going. It's taken us such a long time to get to this point. It's been a lot of hard work, and we'd really need to ramp up production so it doesn't take another year to hit our next major Alpha release. We'd like to finish the full demo version of Gears of Eden as soon as possible. And then head into the full-blwon game. Alpha 2 is really the break point for us that lets us know if we're doing a good job and get to continue this journey with you and for you.We want to do this together, after all. You're a big part of this! You can help by following us on Twitter, Facebook[www.facebook.com], and Instagram[www.instagram.com]. Share our posts, and let others know about our project! You can also join our Discord[discord.gg] server. Come chat with us! Give us some feedback! Let us know what you think. What ideas you have. What you like, or don't like. You can follow us on Twitch[www.twitch.tv], and join our live streams that feature game development, live podcasts, and fun community gameplay nights. If you like any of what you see or hear, there are multiple ways to support our project now. If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can sub for FREE to our channel each month on Twitch[www.twitch.tv]. You can also support us via our website, or Patreon[www.patreon.com]. We'll have other opportunities for support coinciding with our Alpha 2 launch. More to come on that soon!If you're reading this, you're already supporting us by giving us some of your time and attention. Thank you so much! We'll have more updates on our social media pages, and be back with another Dev Update here soon! I also hear rumors there is (finally) a new official Reaching Eden podcast episode releasing very soon! We hope you enjoy it! Thanks again! . Dev Update #84: Alpha 2 In Sight!: We're back! We've defeated the Summer Boss... one of our greatest foes. As we've talked about in previous Dev Updates, this is sort of a cyclical thing for our team: for eight months of the year we are on it with development, and then majorly slow down in the summer. Weird quirks like this are only natural with indie teams, especially those that are not able to do it full-time. Fortunately, this time we can say that our slowdown hasn't been solely due to summer. You see, we also had some major technical obstructions to overcome related to an engine upgrade that we've been working hard to overcome. And now we have!This upgrade brought new features and increased performance, which is wonderful, but it also deprecated some of the main tools we use, and upgrading those tools to an up-to-date spec was not a simple process. It took a lot of time, a lot of trial and error, and eventually a Skype call with a rep from the engine developer—but we finally have those technical matters resolved!So now, we've made it through the struggles of upgrade woes and entered into a clearing. We can see the short path ahead with more clarity, and we've been able to make a lot of forward progress in the last couple of weeks along that route. Here are some of the highlights:First we fixed a problem with a text rendering tool that was crashing all our menus and interfaces. Which is just a little bit game-breaking.We also fixed a camera control conflict and updated the opening cinematic (with an option to spacebar skip through it). While we were working on the camera system, we went ahead and added a camera animation for an encounter with a drone (which now has it's own "waking" animation as well), a bit of functionality that will have plenty of uses later on. You can see a clip of that opening animation from our Twitch stream here[clips.twitch.tv], and the drone animation here[clips.twitch.tv].More recently, we've added new art in the game to represent the four tiers of repair kits. That means we're no longer using duplicates of the fuel cell art to represent these kits! Repair kits are working really well in our internal play testing and proving to be a valuable asset!Finally, we have removed all the old camera render effects from the game, and updated to a newer system. The results are fantastic and the game looks more beautiful than ever before!What's next? A new UI! We've started work on the UI update, which is the last major task we need to complete before launching Alpha 2! We'll be sharing updates on Twitch[www.twitch.tv], Twitter and Discord[discord.gg], so please join us to provide your feedback and ideas. We really value your input and collaboration! Once the UI is complete, we'll be doing a lot of testing, bug squashing, and prepping for our Alpha 2 release! So, if you're interested in playing Alpha 2, please be sure to sign up[gearsofeden.com]!That's going to do it for this update! We look forward to sharing more with you soon! . Dev Update #86: The Next Level: Alright, humans. We've been super busy here at GoE HQ, and I'm excited to share some of our latest updates with you this week! I'm titling this post "The Next Level", because, as we sit here on the precipice of our free Alpha 2 release, there are so many things we are doing to make significant strides forward with our little space robot game. Let's start with some of the in-game updates and branch out from there!I'm very happy to announce that, for the first time ever, Gears of Eden has persistence! We're working hard to include as much persistence as possible in our Alpha 2 release, but already we can now store and retrieve the rover position as well as the battery charge level! This is the first time that playing Gears of Eden hasn't meant starting over from scratch! Next up on our list of things to add to the persistence system are player inventory and equipped parts. At the very least, we'd love to get those two items added to the save system prior to launching Alpha 2, so stay tuned for more news on this soon.Another thing we are polishing up for the Alpha 2 release is the environment in Gears. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been going in and adding areas of interest to the game. These areas serve to break up the monotony of the asteroid and provide unique features and geology. We've even introduced our first area that contains an environment effect mechanic: a vapor field of toxic gas venting from the surface that damages your components! Rumors say there may even be an important item in this dangerous area... so bring some repair kits!In our internal testing builds, we also have recently introduced two new items to the game: sand and glass. Sand introduces our first RNG-based resource. As you drill and collect other elements, such as iron or cobalt, you now have a chance to also collect silicate-rich sand. Each time you do not collect sand, the chance goes up. This small introduction has a number of immediate effects on gameplay. First of all, if you are trying to mine sand, you can't just go out and get what you need. You must mine another element, and pick up sand as a crit drop. Secondly, if you don't want sand, it acts as a filler for your cargo space. This means you have to manage your inventory more carefully, and provides an early incentive to upgrade your cargo hold (something that was previously sorely lacking).The sand is used to build our first second-level crafting resource in the game, glass. In turn, glass is now used in the recipes for solar panels and spectrometers. These changes make the crafting chains a little more challenging and rewarding. We will be looking for feedback on these system during our Alpha 2 testing window, but if you want to get a sneak peek and provide early feedback, be sure to join our gamedev streams on Twitch[www.twitch.tv].The UI upgrade we've been working on is completely done, and we're really down to filling out the persistence system and squashing bugs. We should be announcing a release window for Alpha 2 very soon, so please continue to follow us on Twitter, Instagram[www.instagram.com], and Facebook[www.facebook.com] for the latest information (and be sure you have signed up for a free alpha key on our website[www.GearsOfEden.com]).As for our larger next steps, I would really appreciate your attention here on the state of the game. With Alpha 2, we really need to make some leaps forward in growing our audience and gaining support. We've done just about as much as we can as a team of decentralized indie developers without funding. We're all working on this project in our spare time, and that means develop can be slow and painstaking. We'll be launching a fundraising campaign to correspond with Alpha 2 to help us develop more quickly. We are also trying to exhibit our game at PAX East in late March. If you're unfamiliar with PAX, it is a large gaming convention that draws over 80,000 fans and is held in Boston. It's not cheap to go as an exhibitor. It will cost us several thousand dollars to attend. Money we do not have. So, this is really a make or break moment for us as a development team. I'm leaning toward putting up the money personally to go and see if this can help provide the exponential growth we need - but it also means if we aren't successful, we might be too far in the hole to keep going. We've raised less than a thousand dollars (without a dedicated campaign) in the 2+ years we've been actively developing, and spent many times that already. So, unfortunately, money is a barrier moving forward. That said, I am exploring the idea of having our booth sponsored - so if you know of any business owners that might be interested, please help us get in touch. If you're interested in helping support our booth personally, let us know as well. You can find us on our Discord server[discord.gg], or reach out to us on social media. Otherwise, we would appreciate the support of all of you when we're ready to roll out our fundraising campaign and Alpha 2 launch to help us spread the word!Thank you so much for reading. That's going to do it for this update! In case you missed it, we have some brand new robot-themed shirts and mugs available on our DesignByHumans store[www.designbyhumans.com]! And, as a reminder, if you are an Amazon Prime member, you get a free Twitch subscription to use every month. We'd appreciate you using that sub over on our Twitch channel[www.twitch.tv] if you aren't already using it! Thank you so much for being part of this journey with us! I'm really excited about Alpha 2, PAX, and am hopeful for the opportunity to take Gears of Eden to new heights in 2019 with all of you!. Dev Update #73: Giving a Voice to Our Alpha Trailer: If you've played Gears of Eden Alpha 1, or have watched any of our Alpha 2 test streams on Twitch[twitch.tv], you know that we don't have voiced characters in the game. In fact, we only have one character that really talks at all right now... the main rover character. What little it has to say comes across only in text.There are advantages and disadvantages to having voiced characters in games. A text-based approach allows more dialogue, an easier and less-expensive pipeline for getting updated content into the game, and the ability to have more branching stories and options without incurring a lot of additional costs. Not to mention text files take up a lot less space and processing power. While voiced characters do add a lot of costs, increase production time, and take up more space - they also bring some characteristics to a game text can't do as well on it's own: personality and expression.Don't get me wrong, well written text can convey emotion or express a feeling. Surely. But it does so by relying on the reader's imagination to connect and fill in from their own context and history. A voice actor helps create a more specific and universal character that we can all experience in the same way. In Portal 2, J.K. Simmons created one of the most iconic characters ever seen in a video game... except he's never really seen. Cave Johnson exists almost exclusively as a voice and only a voice. Would that character have the same impact if he were conveyed only in text?For the demo version of Gears of Eden, this problem is easy to answer. At present, we simply do not have the funds to seriously consider fully voicing the game. I wouldn't say that is the only reason we are utilizing a text-only approach—there are narrative reasons we are drawn to text as well—but it's certainly a big factor. Personally, I love the idea of voiced characters in our world, and hope we have the luxury of revisiting this consideration in the future, as that means we'd be in a financial situation to do so!In the meantime, we are looking at other ways to utilize voice. The first attempt is in our upcoming trailer that will be launched to promote our Alpha 2 release (not to be confused with the teaser trailer we launched a couple weeks ago). This trailer is narrated by a friendly AI played by the multi-talented Kristi Kates (who in addition to voice work, also acts, writes, and performs music). We've recently completed voice recording for the trailer, and are really excited to put everything together over the coming weeks.Another way we are looking at utilizing voice is through non-character systems in-game. This could include systems like a base AI with voice prompts, or menu system confirmations. There are a few ways we can still make use of voice without voicing every character in the Gears of Eden universe. We'll be continuing these discussions and decision making processes internally as we move down the development path, but we'd love to hear your feedback and ideas. Feel free to chime in with your two-cents with a comment, or a message on Twitter or Facebook[www.facebook.com].For now, we'll leave you with this tease[gearsofeden.com] from our recent voice recording session.You can find out more about Kristi Kates on her website[www.kristikates.com], or follow her on Twitch [www.twitch.tv]to enjoy her weekly live music streams. As always, you can keep up with Gears of Eden via our pages on Twitter, Facebook[www.facebook.com], or Discord[discord.gg]. In addition, you can support Gears of Eden via our website[gearsofeden.com], through Patreon[www.patreon.com], or via Twitch[www.twitch.tv]. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!. Dev Update #74: Let’s Get Movin’: This week, we're going to keep things brief in our dev update, and do a little more show than tell! Currently, one of the primary goals in our current sprint is to set up the animations of the new rover model. While the new rover has been partially implemented in the game for a while now, importing the animations means importing an updated version of the 3D rover model into the game. Things are going well! But, as with anything else in game development, progress comes with some expected quirks! Now, we could delve into them here and just explain them to death... or we could show you them! They say a picture is worth a thousand words, right... but what about three clips??This first clip[gearsofeden.com] is a video of the new solar panels in action. It looks great, smooth, technical, quick, and functions practically like something that might actually exist. It's exactly what we want... in terms of animation. Some other things, however, are a little bit off. Lets take a closer look.Take a look at this second clip[gearsofeden.com]. Do you see it yet? Well the biggest thing here is that drill. This is one of those weird little bugs that comes up in implementation: that drill really wants to fold inward, almost as if it's scooping instead of drilling, which is actually not part of our planned animations. We'll need to cut that out. But I bet that doesn't distract you from those wheels, right? The wheels work a little different in-engine than the rest of the rover, and so we keep having issues where the textures are missing. Oops. We'll get them to stick though, don't you worry. Right now, the focus is on getting the animations in place. Not making it all look pretty.Another issue, seen in clip 3[gearsofeden.com], is all that clean white. It's not a subtle Tide ad. That's another result of a missing texture! Easy to fix! I really like this clip though because the antenna just looks nuts. Not only is it shrunken down, but it's spinning so fast you might not even be able to tell what's happening! Of all the animation glitches we're running into, this is my favorite. (Especially considering how easy a fix it'll be!) The good news here is the animation is working, and we now just need to refine the playback speed and the size.You can also see some subtle head animations in the clip, which we're really excited about. For now, we're going to have a wide range of head animations that are played at random intervals. Later, we'll refine this system to have the rover react to certain events or spawn for things like idle animations.We'll have these animations ironed out within a day, but we thought we'd share some of the ugly in-between steps in this dev update. It's very rare to implement something new into a game engine and have it work flawlessly and perfectly right away. Game development is a constant integration between implementation and testing, and choices constantly have to be made on how far refinement needs to go before moving on and tackling bigger features.We're really excited to get these animations in place, because we are planning on a special "between alphas" build for our supporters that has been held up by this step. We'll have more information on that once we finish our next round of testing, which you'll be able to watch on our Twitch[www.twitch.tv] channel! In the meantime, if you're interested in supporting Gears of Eden, be sure to check our website or Patreon[www.patreon.com].See? Pretty short! Thank you so much for reading! We'll be back next week with a more involved discussion, but this Dev Update is coming to a close. If you want to see the animations in a more completed state, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook[www.facebook.com], and Twitch[www.twitch.tv]. We're putting out tons of behind-the-scenes content, and that is the best place to discover it the moment it's available. Until then, thank you again for sticking with us and have a great rest of your week.. Dev Update #80: You're In Control!: It's been a while since our last update, but we’re back! We know it's been a while, but we've been in the weeds fixing bugs, and there is only so much we can say about that before it starts to sound really repetitive. Apologies for the radio silence! Development is ongoing though, even if it slows down occasionally, and we’re really excited to talk to you this week!The first bit we have to talk about was sort of a surprise! Our creative director had an evening to spare and wanted to play around with Gears of Eden’s backend and was able to get partial controller support working! He’s even tested it out on our Twitch channel[www.twitch.tv]! Obviously it’s very partial (at multiple points, he had to put down the controller and use his mouse and keyboard) and there’s a lot of fine tuning that needs to happen so that the control scheme is natural to use, but it’s in! As someone who likes to kick back and play on my TV from time to time, this was very exciting to see happen. You can expect at the very least to control the rover and it's functions with a controller in Alpha 2, but any UI or object interactions will likely come afterwards. Full controller support is definitely coming in the future though! We also had planned developments this week as well, the biggest of them being changes to the way that Tier 1 parts functioned. Previously, as the player went through part upgrades, they’d go through a series of degradable parts, from Tier 2 to Tier 4. Once these parts fully degraded, they’d drop--without any accounting for tier level--to Tier 1, which we were treating as the “broken” state. This worked well for gamedev purposes by allowing us to test the basic idea of "part breaks, gets worse" but it's not very usable from a gameplay perspective. No amount of explanation can justify in lore why a) Tier 1, without any other indication, is the broken state or b) Tiers 2, 3, and 4 all function in the exact same way after they fall into disrepair.Now each tier really does have its own broken state, including diminished stats. We plan to include a visual change to the model for this as well, but that’s naturally going to wait until we’ve created models for each tier. We hope that this change will end up in Alpha 2, but given recent delays, we might let those slip into Alpha 3 or the Demo release. We’ll see!Next on our list are some minor bug fixes to various systems, and then the implementation of the new UI! We're really excited about the added functionality and user-friendliness of the new UI and can't wait to get it in game. Stay tuned for updates on our progress soon!That'll be it for this week's Dev Update. We will be back next week with more! If you want to keep up with all things GoE, check out our Twitter and Facebook[www.facebook.com] pages, or give a listen to the most recent episode[gearsofeden.com] of our Reaching Eden podcast! Thank you so much for your support and thank you for reading. We hope to see you again next Wednesday, but until then, have a great rest of your week.. Dev Update #72: Hidden Lore: There was a time when a video game Easter Egg was some strange, hidden reference that you wouldn't be able to find without either a great deal of luck or the knowledge of where it is. A classic example is the Gabe Newell room in Half-Life, and who can forget Guybrush Threepwood (of Monkey Island fame) showing up in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2? Oh. Just me? Okay, well I still maintain that the game is worth playing to see Guybrush and Darth Vader go at it. (Actually, having watched that video... maybe not.)The point is that we still have this classic form of the video game Easter Egg and I doubt it's going anywhere in the foreseeable future. It has been supplanted, however, by a new form of Easter Egg: the lore object. These are diaries, codex entries, in-world books, and so on. Typically, they're just as unnecessary to the game's enjoyment as their older brethren, but they offer the developer an easy way to further engage the portion of their audience that needs to know more about the game and its world without boring the rest of the audience to tears. A nice little combination, right? In the right hands, these lore objects transcend their status as Easter Eggs and become fully realized tools.Anyone who remembers back to the original cRPG days can tell you that these have been around longer than many gamers today have even been alive. And yet, I'd wager that most people first experienced lore objects in an Elder Scrolls game or perhaps one of the modern Fallout games. The thought that went into these brief texts is truly impressive. If you play Skyrim, it is very possible that you'll read from multiple different genres! Comedies, textbooks, academic papers, epistolary works, and, quite famously, erotica (to name a few). It even goes beyond that though! Not only are there multiple genres to read from, there are multiple authors to read by! One series of textbooks reads completely different from another, and the same can be said any of the other genres.As a writer, this is... fascinating. Tantalizing! But also, terrifying. As much as I love the Mass Effect franchise, I will forever see the codex system they have as a red flag. Certainly, this codex contains a huge amount of cool information about the game universe, but it's just so tiring to read. In an effort to realistically capture the feel of an encyclopedia, they succeeded so well as to turn the writing dry and lifeless. And though this is more realistic, it's hard to ask a player to care about your plethora of made up information if it isn't even pleasant to read.We are really excited that we are going to hit one of our stretch goals with Alpha 2, and that is the inclusion of lore items! These lore objects are something we want to use in Gears of Eden, but we want to do it right. It isn't our goal to convince you that our world is real, but instead to convince you that it is thought provoking. We want you to care, and we want you to have fun! So here's our plan. When you start up the Alpha 2 release and you start rolling around, you'll find lore objects around the place. Diaries and the such. These aren't going to be crazy, just little bits of text where we do not describe the world... we'll demonstrate it through the eyes of those who have to live in it. If reading lore text isn't your thing, we totally understand. But for those of you who do enjoy that sort of thing, we hope you'll enjoy this first taste.That's it for this week's Dev Update! I wish I could delve further into this topic, but it's better to leave off wanting more than less, right? If you'd like to talk more about any of this (or even just talk about your favorite Easter Eggs), pop on by our Discord channel[discord.gg]! Maybe hang out a bit. And if you want to see the latest and great Gears of Eden news, consider following us on Twitter and Facebook[www.facebook.com]. Those are definitely the places to be if you're interested in game art. We'll also be streaming more Alpha 2 testing over on Twitch[www.twitch.tv] this week and weekend, and would love to have you join us in chat! We'll be back next week with another Dev Update, and we hope to see you then. Until then, have a great rest of your week.. Dev Update #73: Giving a Voice to Our Alpha Trailer: If you've played Gears of Eden Alpha 1, or have watched any of our Alpha 2 test streams on Twitch[twitch.tv], you know that we don't have voiced characters in the game. In fact, we only have one character that really talks at all right now... the main rover character. What little it has to say comes across only in text.There are advantages and disadvantages to having voiced characters in games. A text-based approach allows more dialogue, an easier and less-expensive pipeline for getting updated content into the game, and the ability to have more branching stories and options without incurring a lot of additional costs. Not to mention text files take up a lot less space and processing power. While voiced characters do add a lot of costs, increase production time, and take up more space - they also bring some characteristics to a game text can't do as well on it's own: personality and expression.Don't get me wrong, well written text can convey emotion or express a feeling. Surely. But it does so by relying on the reader's imagination to connect and fill in from their own context and history. A voice actor helps create a more specific and universal character that we can all experience in the same way. In Portal 2, J.K. Simmons created one of the most iconic characters ever seen in a video game... except he's never really seen. Cave Johnson exists almost exclusively as a voice and only a voice. Would that character have the same impact if he were conveyed only in text?For the demo version of Gears of Eden, this problem is easy to answer. At present, we simply do not have the funds to seriously consider fully voicing the game. I wouldn't say that is the only reason we are utilizing a text-only approach—there are narrative reasons we are drawn to text as well—but it's certainly a big factor. Personally, I love the idea of voiced characters in our world, and hope we have the luxury of revisiting this consideration in the future, as that means we'd be in a financial situation to do so!In the meantime, we are looking at other ways to utilize voice. The first attempt is in our upcoming trailer that will be launched to promote our Alpha 2 release (not to be confused with the teaser trailer we launched a couple weeks ago). This trailer is narrated by a friendly AI played by the multi-talented Kristi Kates (who in addition to voice work, also acts, writes, and performs music). We've recently completed voice recording for the trailer, and are really excited to put everything together over the coming weeks.Another way we are looking at utilizing voice is through non-character systems in-game. This could include systems like a base AI with voice prompts, or menu system confirmations. There are a few ways we can still make use of voice without voicing every character in the Gears of Eden universe. We'll be continuing these discussions and decision making processes internally as we move down the development path, but we'd love to hear your feedback and ideas. Feel free to chime in with your two-cents with a comment, or a message on Twitter or Facebook[www.facebook.com].For now, we'll leave you with this tease[gearsofeden.com] from our recent voice recording session.You can find out more about Kristi Kates on her website[www.kristikates.com], or follow her on Twitch [www.twitch.tv]to enjoy her weekly live music streams. As always, you can keep up with Gears of Eden via our pages on Twitter, Facebook[www.facebook.com], or Discord[discord.gg]. In addition, you can support Gears of Eden via our website[gearsofeden.com], through Patreon[www.patreon.com], or via Twitch[www.twitch.tv]. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!. Dev Update #87: ALPHA 2 HAS ARRIVED!: It's been a long time coming, but we're excited to finally be able to say... GEARS OF EDEN Alpha 2 is here!!! We’ve been working very hard for the past year to achieve this milestone! As always, we maintain our usual disclaimer: this isn’t yet Early Access; this isn’t even a demo! This is an Alpha - which means everything you see is in development and may be replaced at some point down the road. It's really a proof of concept more than anything else at this stage, but we still hope you enjoy it!We are extremely excited to share this release with you. Alpha 2 is the product of our blood, sweat, and tears and we simply cannot wait to see what you think. Please be aware, you will need an Alpha Key to play Gears of Eden - Alpha 2. You can get your free key on our website[www.gearsofeden.com]! In addition to the key, you need the alpha demo client, which you can download here on Steam! If you have any questions at all, feel free to stop by our Discord[discord.gg] and let us know. We're happy to help!If you played our first alpha release, you might be wondering what new stuff we’ve got in store for you. Well, we don’t have time to get into all of it here, but let me give you a quick rundown. With this latest release, we’ve added: a Persistence system so you can get right back where you left off! We’ve also done a full overhaul on the UI system, fleshed out the crafting system, put in some cool Twitch integration for you streamers out there, and gave you some tools to make your time a little more comfortable. Oh, and did I mention that we have filled the asteroid with sights to see, hazards to brave, puzzles to solve and some hints at the full game’s story that we’re very excited for you to check out! And best of all? That’s not even everything! For full details, check out the changelog.[gearsofeden.com]All on its own, this release has been a huge milestone for us, but there's something else just as big. For the first time in Gears of Eden's development, we exhibited at a convention! And not just any convention: WE WENT TO PAX EAST!!! This convention was a surreal, amazing experience for us. We went with zero expectations, but hundreds of people swarmed Gears of Eden, playing it, asking questions, hanging out, and really, just overwhelming us with a tidal wave of kindness and support. To go from feeling like your game is a dream that you toil away at night into... all of that? It's amazing. If you were there PAX and stopped by, know that you made our entire weekend. Just, I might add, as much as everyone who has been supporting us for these past two years.Thank you all so, so much. Never have we felt so energized and confident in our game. We could keep going with these thanks, but instead we'll end it here. Please do give our game a shot and let us know what you think. Every bit of feedback we can get right now will help us moving forward to make Gears of Eden the best game we possibly can!Hey Streamers! If you are on Twitch, we'd love to partner with you! Gears of Eden features 4 chat commands that your audience can use to effect you in the game: zap, turbo, luck and solar flare! Let us know if you're interested in streaming Gears of Eden - we'd love to send some audience your way!. Dev Update #84: Alpha 2 In Sight!: We're back! We've defeated the Summer Boss... one of our greatest foes. As we've talked about in previous Dev Updates, this is sort of a cyclical thing for our team: for eight months of the year we are on it with development, and then majorly slow down in the summer. Weird quirks like this are only natural with indie teams, especially those that are not able to do it full-time. Fortunately, this time we can say that our slowdown hasn't been solely due to summer. You see, we also had some major technical obstructions to overcome related to an engine upgrade that we've been working hard to overcome. And now we have!This upgrade brought new features and increased performance, which is wonderful, but it also deprecated some of the main tools we use, and upgrading those tools to an up-to-date spec was not a simple process. It took a lot of time, a lot of trial and error, and eventually a Skype call with a rep from the engine developer—but we finally have those technical matters resolved!So now, we've made it through the struggles of upgrade woes and entered into a clearing. We can see the short path ahead with more clarity, and we've been able to make a lot of forward progress in the last couple of weeks along that route. Here are some of the highlights:First we fixed a problem with a text rendering tool that was crashing all our menus and interfaces. Which is just a little bit game-breaking.We also fixed a camera control conflict and updated the opening cinematic (with an option to spacebar skip through it). While we were working on the camera system, we went ahead and added a camera animation for an encounter with a drone (which now has it's own "waking" animation as well), a bit of functionality that will have plenty of uses later on. You can see a clip of that opening animation from our Twitch stream here[clips.twitch.tv], and the drone animation here[clips.twitch.tv].More recently, we've added new art in the game to represent the four tiers of repair kits. That means we're no longer using duplicates of the fuel cell art to represent these kits! Repair kits are working really well in our internal play testing and proving to be a valuable asset!Finally, we have removed all the old camera render effects from the game, and updated to a newer system. The results are fantastic and the game looks more beautiful than ever before!What's next? A new UI! We've started work on the UI update, which is the last major task we need to complete before launching Alpha 2! We'll be sharing updates on Twitch[www.twitch.tv], Twitter and Discord[discord.gg], so please join us to provide your feedback and ideas. We really value your input and collaboration! Once the UI is complete, we'll be doing a lot of testing, bug squashing, and prepping for our Alpha 2 release! So, if you're interested in playing Alpha 2, please be sure to sign up[gearsofeden.com]!That's going to do it for this update! We look forward to sharing more with you soon!
top of page
bottom of page
Komentar